Tag Archives: English Country Homes

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Historic English Homes: Writer Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Piers Court’, Gloucester

December 18, 2022 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Piers Court, the house where Evelyn Waugh wrote his nostalgic masterpiece Brideshead Revisited, was used as a safe house for Royalists during the Civil War. He lived there from 1937 to 1956 – apart from during the war years when it was taken over by nuns.

December 16, 2022

It seems a sad state of affairs for a famed house whose previous owners — who bought Piers Court in 2010 — had done much to enhance a place described by Pevsner as ‘dignified and elegant’, which, behind its classical 18th-century façade, caters for both formal entertaining and informal family living. The standard of fixtures and fittings is really something – as this picture of one of the bathrooms demonstrates.

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Historical, Homes, Stories, Tours, Travel, Views

English Country Homes: The Abington ‘Hunting’ Lodge On River Granta

May 11, 2022 boomersdaily Leave a comment

A truly idyllic home that was once the hunting lodge for the Earl of Grosvenor, now transformed into an elegant period home https://t.co/VqFLiYxS3T pic.twitter.com/gSnRCTglhZ
— Country Life (@Countrylifemag) May 10, 2022

Nestled in a private corner of the award-winning village of Great Abington is Abington Lodge: Where over 19 acres of gardens and grounds meet with elegant interiors and wonderful ancillary accommodation.

It’s hard to tell what’s best about Grade II-listed Abington Lodge, in Great Abington —whether the idyllic setting in a little more than 19 acres of parkland and paddocks coursed by the River Granta, the 8,600sq ft interior with magnificent spiral staircase and floor-to-ceiling sash windows or the intriguing history: the house was once a hunting lodge for Richard, Earl of Grosvenor, whose wife scandalised Georgian Britain for her relationship with the Duke of Cumberland.

Abington Lodge, which is currently on the market via Cheffins with a guide price of £3.5 million, has eight bedrooms in the main building, and also comes with a two-bedroom coach house, two self-contained apartments, a striking indoor pool and a stable block.

Homes, Stories, Tours, Travel, Views

Tours: English Writer Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Combe Florey House’ In Somerset

January 9, 2022 boomersdaily Leave a comment

In the depths of Somerset, near the Quantock Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Exmoor National Park, you’ll find Combe Florey House.

It’s a regal 18^th century Elizabethan manor house, composed of red ashlar sandstone (in the style of renowned architect James Gibbs) that has some of the most spectacular views over the surrounding luscious green countryside we’ve come across.

A manor house has been on the site for many centuries, but the previous building was destroyed in the Civil War, and the present 17th century house was extensively remodelled by William Frauncies in 1730. The property was sold to the Perring family in 1799 and sold again in 1896 to the Batchelor family before being purchased by the writer Evelyn Waugh as his family home in 1956.

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English Country Homes: The Old Watermill In Clophill, Bedfordshire

August 7, 2021 boomersdaily Leave a comment

The word ‘idyllic’ doesn’t seem quite enough for some properties — and the Old Watermill in Clophill, Bedfordshire, with water rights over the River Flit and waterfalls in the garden, is a prime example of just how magical a house can be.

Lydia Stangroom, August 6, 2021

The stunning property is thought to date from the 18th century, with many of the bricks transcribed with the date 1725. However, as expected, the bricks are just the beginning of the many period features retained in this property.

Within the house is ‘an undershot wheel which drove three pairs of stones, grinding both wheat for flour and grain for animal feed’. Although, perhaps the most obvious feature are the exposed ceiling timbers, which run throughout every room, and juxtapose effortlessly with the exposed red brick work.

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English Country Estates: Aberdyfi, Western Wales

July 14, 2021 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Owned by the vendors for 20 years or more, elegant, Edwardian Plas Penhelig, was built in 1908. It stands in just under 12½ acres of gardens, paddocks and woodland and boasts ‘six different views over the picturesque Dyfi estuary’.

Penny Churchill, July 14, 2021

Thanks to the waters of the Gulf Stream, rare plants and flowers flourish in Plas Penhelig’s sheltered valley, where the hillside is planted with a mass of shrubs, flowers and trees—from peonies and azaleas to camellias, magnolias, lavender, laburnum, lilac trees and a monkey puzzle.

Read and see more at Country Life Magazine

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English Country Homes: Avon Court, Alveston

July 12, 2021 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Everything about Avon Court has a opulent yet whimsical air about it — from the large wrought iron entrance gates, to the mature Willow tree in the garden that leads down to a mooring on a private stretch of river.

Annunciata Elwes, July 12, 2021

Avon Court’s glorious setting on a bend of the Avon — with private frontage, a mooring beside a lovely willow and dipping opportunities through the bull rushes on hot days — is hard to beat.

Historical, Homes, Travel, Views

English Country Estates: Yarner House – Dartmoor

June 22, 2021 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Yarner House and the adjoining Yarner Wood, a 365-acre block of ancient woodland managed by Natural England as part of the East Dartmoor National Nature Reserve, were both once part of the manor of Bovey Tracey granted by William the Conqueror to Geoffrey de Mowbray, Bishop of Coutances.

Penny Churchill June 22, 2021

On de Mowbray’s death in 1093, his nephew, Robert Mowbray, Earl of Northumberland, inherited, but later defied the king, which led to the seizure of his estates in 1095.

Over time, ownership of the Bovey Tracey estates reverted to the Crown as favourites came and went, until, in the 16th century, a succession of costly wars left Tudor monarchs strapped for cash.

Elizabeth I began to sell off Crown properties and, in 1578, the Yarner estate was bought by Gregory Sprint, a canny lawyer with good Court connections, who swiftly resold it at a profit.

English Country Homes: 17th-Century Urchfont Manor In Wiltshire, UK

June 12, 2021 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Within a few years of buying Urchfont Manor in 2013, Chris Legg and Eleanor Jones, with the help of a friend, landscape architect Paul Gazerwitz, had given their home a new vista that unites house and garden, as well as evoking the formal Baroque of the house’s late-17th-century past.

George Plumptre June 12, 2021

Their aim was to balance historical integrity with the development of a new garden. Continuity would be kept by preserving the garden’s bones, such as the walled garden and the fine trees beyond open lawn to the south and east. Work began on the rectangular walled kitchen garden.

The architecture on this side of the house is engagingly uneven and this is picked up in the new garden, which is neat and formal, but appropriately domestic in scale. The kitchen garden has been laid out afresh, with 16 rectangular patches divided by narrow gravel paths and with a square of four greengages in the centre. Crops are rotated and, every year, one bed celebrates an unusual plant, such as borlotti beans or root ginger. Elsewhere are nurtured asparagus and strawberry beds and a fruit cage with raspberries and gooseberries.

English Country Homes: Sortridge Manor In Dartmoor National Park

June 8, 2021 boomersdaily Leave a comment

Over in West Devon, the village of Horrabridge in the Dartmoor National Park, four miles south of Tavistock, grew up around an ancient crossing over the fast-flowing River Walkham, a famous salmon river, its 15th-century bridge one of the oldest in Devon.

In the late 1800s/early 1900s, the south wing of the original Elizabethan building was rebuilt after ‘three successive fires’ destroyed ‘the hall and one wing’.

In the late 1800s, three sisters sold the 400-acre Sortridge estate to a Plymouth stockbroker who immediately sold it again in lots, thereby doubling his money.

The manor and 140 acres of land were bought by Col Marwood Tucker, whose widow sold the property to George Porter Rogers in 1955. In November 1961, Mr Rogers sold the manor with three acres of grounds for £5,500 to Cmdr C. R. Smythe, who sold it in turn to Cmdr Stubley.

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English Country Estates: ‘Tormarton Court’ In Badminton, Cotswolds

June 3, 2021 boomersdaily Leave a comment

There is no better address in the Cotswolds than that of the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton estate in south-west Gloucestershire.

The property originally dates from the 16th century, with alterations from the 17th and 18th centuries, but the present house is largely based on the remodelling that took place in 1812 for the Duke of Beaufort’s son, Lord William Somerset, who was rector of St Mary Magdalene Church that stands opposite the former rectory.